iXsystems releases FreeNAS 8.0.1

Features added to FreeNAS 8.0.1 include S.M.A.R.T. and UPS services, USB 3.0 support, and OSX Lion AFP and Time Machine compatibility. In addition, cronjob support and rsync have been added to the GUI, and replication has been improved for increased data integrity.

The most significant changes since FreeNAS 8.0 are:

Divorced the volume members in the database from the FreeBSD devices. This resolves an issue where FreeBSD can change devices names and the GUI doesn’t pick up the updates due to the devices names being hard-wired in the database.

Support exporting ZFS zvols (virtual devices) as device extents via iSCSI. 8.0 was only able to export physical device nodes or file based extents.

The GUI now has an event notification system.

The email backend has been refactored.

Many many changes in the GUI to help it validate and sanitize inputs that are passed to the backend daemons.

Added UPS functionality.

Added rsync client and server functionality.

Added the ability to schedule cron jobs in the GUI.

Vastly improved and reworked snapshot replication.

Since FreeNAS is now following the release schedule of the underlying FreeBSD operating systems, this version is labelled 8.0.1 (update 1, based on FreeBSD 8.0), though 8.1 or 8.5 would have been more appropriate looking at the host of changes and improvements this latest version has received. The next planned version, FreeNAS 8.1 will add a plugin system, based on PC-BSD’s PBI technology, so the base system can be easily expanded with things like bittorrent, uPNP etc). Hopefully 8.1 will be the best free NAS operating system for both home users and enterprises.